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Whoa, Saddam captured? I guess being up at 5 AM has the advantage of knowing the breaking news.

4:15 AM and I’ve been trying to sleep since 11:30 PM. The only explanation is that the decaf coffee I ordered during dessert wasn’t quite decaf.

I’m sure my WRX-loving friends (Jeff, Joe, Jenn, Eric, etc) will get a kick out of the Saabaru!

Only in Redmond, Washington are you going to find an Acura NSX:

in the mall parking lot and a Ferrari 360 Modena:





in your office garage. I apologize about the quality of that second picture; I had to use the “Dim” mode on my camera phone and that cuts quality in half. The NSX also had the license plate “SLOW V6”, but my picture of that didn’t come out.

Yesterday, I was talking to the person on my team that is setting up our holiday party. We were talking about trying to get a small group of the younger members of the team together for the division-wide holiday party. I told her that the menu seemed fairly extravagant, so I was definitely going. She hadn’t seen that email and she couldn’t find it in her inbox, so she asked me who sent it so she could search for it. Oddly enough, the first thing that came to mind was “Merlot reduction”, since I believe one of the meat dishes featured that. Her quote “Have you ever heard of the word… what is it… metrosexual?”



Everyone thinks of me when they hear that word and now people think of the word when they think of me. When I told Russ this story, he said he thinks of me every time he hears that word.

Remind me to post about being hit on at AX and my coworker calling me a metrosexual.

iDuck: “Akuma, no one is buying our USB drives! We need to carve out a niche market and I believe the main problem is that no one wants to carry around something that looks like a dorky pack of gum. What do kids like nowadays? My 2 year old daughter loves her toys… hmm… I’m getting an idea! USB drive toys!”

Once again, learning something not from Slashdot, but because of links found there. Starting with this discussion about a nuclear-powered mission to the moons of Jupiter, there was a link to this article, stating that crash landing a nuclear-powered probe into Jupiter could cause it to turn into a star. Basically, this article is full of facts and a gross misuse of these facts. They have correct information about the Galileo craft and some fairly factual discussion about fission, fusion and bombs. While it is true that the materials on the craft could be used for a fission bomb, they completely ignored the concept of critical mass. I couldn’t think of the right term while reading the incorrect article, but the question of just how much plutonium was necessary came to mind.



Bad Astronomy saves the day and debunks the possiblity of a small nuclear-powered probe turning Jupiter into a star with this article. The critical (pun intended) points here are:

1. The plutonium onboard Galileo was kept in small pellets, none of which were near critical mass.
   

2. The hydrogen on Jupiter is of the most abundant isotope and lacks deuterium and tritium needed for a fusion reaction.
   

3. Jupiter is about 1/80th the size needed to be a self-sustaining star.
   

I love science.

The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else doing it wrong, without commenting.

— T.H. White

Ford strives to give SVT models upscale image: Ok, so we already knew that Ford was going to drop the SVT Focus. Now we find out that the Focus ST will not have the 170 HP engine from he UK but will be roughly 150 HP. Not good. To make up for that power gap, Ford will release a turbocharged Focus in 2005 or 2006. The estimate is around 200 HP, so this will probably not be the 215 HP Focus RS, unfortunately.